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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Bedlam »

General Zod wrote:Here's the other problem with drones. What happens in an emergency? Say a severe blizzard is coming up; are there going to be enough drones to keep everyone stocked up before the blizzard hits in a reasonable amount of time? Will some people just be screwed when they could have otherwise gone to the store?
I don't think this is any more of a problem than the current situation, you currently get panic buying which can mean that those who wait can't get what they need or some issue stopping delivery to specific stores. I suppose you could argue that it's another possible point of failure which will make things worse but that's not really a drone specific issue, it could be argued that small flying drones would actually make it easier to get supplies to people rather than them having to walk / drive to a nearby store although it depends on the emergency.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Zaune »

And in any case, I know we don't get the kind of blizzards that many parts of North America do, but whenever we have a severe-weather warning around here the "panic buying" tends to be confined to perishable stuff like milk or bread. After all, most people don't wait until they're down to the very last tin at the back of the cupboard before they do their weekly or monthly grocery run if they can possibly help it.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Broomstick »

Bedlam wrote:
General Zod wrote:Here's the other problem with drones. What happens in an emergency? Say a severe blizzard is coming up; are there going to be enough drones to keep everyone stocked up before the blizzard hits in a reasonable amount of time? Will some people just be screwed when they could have otherwise gone to the store?
I don't think this is any more of a problem than the current situation, you currently get panic buying which can mean that those who wait can't get what they need or some issue stopping delivery to specific stores. I suppose you could argue that it's another possible point of failure which will make things worse but that's not really a drone specific issue, it could be argued that small flying drones would actually make it easier to get supplies to people rather than them having to walk / drive to a nearby store although it depends on the emergency.
While drones are less capable during a storm, afterwards they would be more capable than ground transport as they will not require roads to be cleared before they can start making deliveries.

These days, thanks to improved weather forecasting, grocery/hardware/other stores can anticipate large storms that will drive up demand for certain items and possible increase stocks prior to the storm. My employer does that with winter storms - all stores in the affected area get extra stocks of things like salt, snow shovels, and other relevant items in advance of the storm when possible, which helps even if there is panic buying.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by TithonusSyndrome »

Broomstick wrote:
TithonusSyndrome wrote:So the solution to a system designed to funnel surplus value to the 1% is less efficient practices and systems. Brilliant. Break out the steam locomotives, Broomstick has found a way to stick it to the wealthy.
No, the solution is to come up with a system that doesn't stick it to everyone BUT the wealthy. Or do you have the illusion that you will be part of the 1%? If you're posting here you aren't, those sorts aren't slumming down here with us.
What you are blustering incoherently about is finding an alternative to capitalism. This is outside the scope of the current topic, which is not my problem, unlike you and your tendency to move the goalposts like the dementia-riddled fool you are.
Yeah, that must be why I was advocating walking in parks and woods?
Yeah, that's great - if you can get access to those parks and woods. That's what you seem too obtuse to understand.
"I can't get to the woods" isn't a rebuttal to me clarifying that I clearly don't want a future of indefinite indoor hermitage, you bleating invalid.
I didn't realize that self-driving cars and drones were part of the labor market in the 1980s? It didn't take off then so it can't take off in the near-future when the right tech is properly implemented, is that the argument?
No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days I was taken seriously by my peers and not such a laughingstock who alienated everyone around me
Long story short; Broomstick is an illiterate retard who didn't take into account the fact that the whole reason this model of grocery delivery is being revisited in the first place is because automation makes the economics viable enough to reexamine, and like the dotty old cow she is, she somehow thinks that recounting the minutiae of the prior incarnation of this system qualifies as a rebuttal of some kind... or at least some variety of the social supplement she evidently craves so badly, even if she does reduce herself to the piteous cliche of the "old person recounting pointless stories" in the process.
"And if they don't" they'll support a shrinking market for brick-and-mortar locations for as long as their demographic still exists, which will disappear when they do in a gradual manner, possibly over two decades at the very most. Your "YOU WANNA KILL GRANDMA" histrionics are boilerplate SDN moral outrage pantomime that is around a decade or so past due even if it wasn't so far off the mark.
You mean like farmer's markets are a thing of the past... oh wait, if anything there are more now than 30 years ago.
Classic "here's a statistically irrelevant exception to the rule" Broomstick. Pair it with some meandering anecdotes about the time in 1987 she bought a crepe from a farmer's market in Indiana and the package will be complete.
Like I said - your experience with life is short. There are many many things that started to disappear but then came back because people missed them, or saw value in them. You haven't lived long enough to see this. You're like someone in the 1950's screaming food pills are the future! while completely lacking an understanding that food is more than just supplying nutrients.

Yes, I am pulling the I'm older and I know better line on you because in this case it's true - I'm older and I know better.
You're a miserable self-hating old loser who wants to pantomime the appearance of wisdom in front of an audience in a setting she is relatively certain she has some assurances of not being universally laughed at. After over a decade of residence on a forum where phrases like "the plural of anecdote is not data" were in common currency, and probably more than one article posted to the site about the malleability of individual human memory in the form of phenomena like the Rashomon Effect, she still thinks the "life experience" card is anything other than a gimmick that merits nothing past puzzled looks of concern and alarm.
Sure, grocery delivery with drones will become an OPTION, it will not wholly replace the grocery store any more than grocery stores eliminated farmer's markets or even the gas-station type quickie-mart. The downside is that the poorer folks likely will have fewer or no options.
The earth is flat because chocolate tastes delicious.

Hey, as long as we're making non-sequitur fiat claims...
I'm not that upset, to be honest; more than anything I'm sort of bewildered at your whole "shocked 1920's dowager" shtick in response to a model of business that would relieve said infirm and elderly from the tiring and difficult obligation of having to retrieve their groceries at an age where said obligation is not a casual undertaking, and casting it as some kind of campaign to terrorize them.
Right, because it's better to give the elderly and infirm NO option, just leave them isolated in little cubes and leave some food at the door so they don't starve.
Perhaps one fine day you will explain this malady of the mind that causes you to arrive at the non-sequitur that eliminating grocery stores will somehow forbid the elderly from departing their residences for other social engagements. That's the problem with putting "life experience" on a pedestal, particularly in lieu of other forms of acquiring knowledge; the limits of your personal experience become your entire world.
"Oh, wait", this is just Broomstick's incipient dementia coming into bloom.
Oh, look - someone has no argument so let's engage in ad hominem attacks.

Next time, try a valid debating tactic.
That statement was issued in tandem with no less than two valid arguments. You intentionally parsed them out because you don't have the intellectual accountability or courage to confront them and hoped with some clumsy editing to feign victimhood.
Well, I would wager that in "the past", people bought their groceries at brick and mortar locations because urban crowding hadn't escalated to the specific proportions it has now and because the introduction of new technology hadn't made revising the grocery delivery model a possibility.
What, you think urban crowding is a new thing? Really? Aren't you precious - you think we were all living on farms 50 years ago?
urban crowding hadn't escalated to THE SPECIFIC PROPORTIONS IT HAS NOW
Broomstick; illiterate retard, twice proven.
This is your favorite thing to do in these arguments; rattle off every possible counteracting factor without any regard for their magnitude, statistical likelihood or significance.
Uh... yeah. I thought coming up with opposing arguments was the whole point of having a debate.
Listing nickel-and-dime non-arguments isn't debate. It's padding, which you resort to quite often.
Tell you what; you come up with some sources indicating that it's possible to defraud a grocery delivering website in similar proportion to the combined costs of shoplifting and employee theft, and I'll take this line of argument seriously.
Since I'm not a hacker I don't have a bunch of hacker buddies to clue me in on technique, but it was well broadcast last Christmas that package thefts are on the rise, with people watching for deliveries then stealing them off porches. I don't see why employees of a company that does home delivers - even with drones - couldn't be involved in theft. Granted there would be fewer such employees to have an opportunity, but you don't need a small army to steal packages.
:lol: Here's another one for Meandering Old Lady Bingo: "Oh, I heard a story some time ago in passing in a non-technical medium, and I kind of got the gist of it, but not really, but anyways I'm going to assume it reinforces my beliefs."

Thank goodness nobody of consequences uses your math-averse approach to cost-benefit analyses, or otherwise nothing would ever get done.
Yeah about that - do you know what "dowager" means?
In contemporary use, "dowager" is commonly used as a shorthand to refer to supercillious and histronic older women, in the model of turn of the 20th century east coast socialites (Florence Foster Jenkins, etc) who would engage in generous performative pearl-clutching to supplement the paucity of their arguments which were typically based on little more than appeals to social convention. I guess if you don't know this, maybe you could benefit from some more life experience.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by TithonusSyndrome »

Simon_Jester wrote:I'm sure a sufficiently elaborate system can be devised to allow me to make an online purchase of oranges with the specific degree of ripeness I desire, just as soon as we have a uniform scale of ripeness that everyone understands clearly, and as soon as the grocery stores decide it's actually worth the effort to buy robots with integrated scanning equipment that can assess the oranges instead of just grabbing them randomly.

Picking produce out isn't quite the same as ordering a pizza, because there's more to it than "I want olives on that." A lot of grocery shopping does reduce to "and I want olives on that," as I already said. But the parts that don't reduce that way so easily are going to take a lot more automation than the rest, and it is highly likely that people will simply eat (literally) a decline in quality due to not being able to inspect the products they're buying prior to arrival on their doorstep. Will everyone get used to it? Very possibly. But it's tiresome and willfully obtuse to pretend nothing is happening.
I think you may be underestimating the advances in cost and accuracy of the automation needed to inspect groceries, but even beyond that there's a much earlier node we could focus on and potentially cut costs most efficiently; the start of the entire supply chain. I don't have anything handy to ballpark this estimate with, but I wouldn't be surprised if within about ten years time it became possible to create produce up to a single uniform standard of exceptional ripeness that would make inspection near-superfluous. We're certainly getting close to in-vitro meat that does this very thing, after all.
Making things more efficient in the abstract works in an economy that's configured to make sharing the wealth thus created possible. When the economy is not thus configured, it is ivory tower detachment of the worst kind to pretend that the consequences will be uniformly beneficial.
I don't recall specifically denying this or doing anything other than addressing the particular issue of grocery delivery a la carte in the interests of cohesion and scope. I just hope you realize how fucking perverse it is to rally to the defense of major grocery retail corporations as being somehow guardians of the fabric of society in anything resembling good faith. They acquired these roles either indirectly or with motives other than altruism in mind, and the sooner we can move to a model of eldercare and disability support that does not rely on the fickle beneficence of Walgreen's and co., the better.
I have gone on record as saying that this one thing will be broadly improved by having the industry move to a broadly online model. The food pill hyperbole has been a strawman of your invention.
No, it's an analogy. Remember those?
Any analogy that paints me as eager to move every single industry to online order and delivery is a strawman. It is my position that on balance, it would be best for everyone that this particular industry move to that model, and I assume this would involve at least as much give and take among interested parties - with some perhaps giving more than taking in some cases - as any other large move of this kind.
Progress comes with improvements and drawbacks. There have long been, and probably will continue to be, people who see only the improvements or only the drawbacks. The "we'll evolve into giant brains" crowd were ignoring drawbacks. So were the "food pill" idiots. Or any number of other groups of futurists who turned out to be amusingly wrong in hindsight.

I'm not even arguing that the improvements aren't there. I'm just opposed to this stance of aggressive denialism about the drawbacks.
If the most severe drawbacks you can think of are ones that can be mitigated with just a few spontaneous nostrums, like committing the reclaimed grocery stores to become new purpose-made elder care facilities, I think it's safe to say that the bulk of the debate is contained in the "how" and not the "ought" of the matter.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Gandalf »

Broomstick wrote:So... people are moving into the cities proper, but you think knocking down grocery stores and building housing an hour or two from where people are moving to live is somehow going to solve this problem?

Are you going to force city people to move to that housing?

If those suburbs were viable places to live wouldn't people be moving there instead of deeper into the cities.
Allow me to simplify. People are moving towards cities because rural communities are increasingly failing, suburbs are expensive and based around cars, and the cities have the decent jobs. As per supply and demand, this pushes real estate prices in and around cities upwards. I've know people who sleep 2-3 to a single bed (they sleep in shifts) because getting a place they could afford and have their own space would mean over three extra hours of commuting a day, and being in a less than ideal area. This rising in property costs will invariably affect supermarkets, which will in turn pass costs on to consumers.
No one is saying you can't have that option - the problem is in taking away options from everyone else.

Back in the day, as I noted, you could have your groceries picked out and/or delivered. You didn't have to waste your precious time shopping back then, either.

Meanwhile, some people DO want to spend some of their free time shopping in brick-and-mortar. Why are you opposed to them making that choice?

Probably notable is that it seems to be mostly women who want to wander the aisles making their selections. A slice of humanity in the notable minority in this thread.
:wtf:

I feel as though I've stepped into a weird parody of American debate, where one wins by insisting that one's opponent hates freedom and wants to deny choice to people.

If one enjoys shopping in a brick and mortar store, then one will need to be prepared to pay for the privilege, because that appears to be where the market is going. American shopping centres do great in rich areas above a certain density, but outside of that economic bracket, ugh.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Simon_Jester »

There's a special kind of mindset required to say "I don't know how or care how the other half live, so I'm going to go 'attack dog' on anyone who tries to tell me how the other half live." I can't remember meeting a single person who fit that description that I ever managed to retain any respect for. Thanks for not breaking that pattern, TithonusSyndrome.
Gandalf wrote:
Broomstick wrote:
It's only a "problem that doesn't exist" if you 1) don't realize how much ever-more-valuable urban area is being taken up by grocery outlets and the costs folded into food purchases that their upkeep entails or 2) completely missed the earlier conversation about theft in grocery chains.
Oh HEAVENS! - People are building grocery stores in CITIES!!!!

Where the fuck did you think city people bought food in the past?
I'm unfamiliar with the ivory tower in which you live, but real estate in many cities is becoming more expensive as rural communities and some suburbs are less viable and the people move back to cities in search of jobs and viable living. Thousands of square metres worth of fuckoff huge supermarkets, every two or three suburbs could be put to better usage as housing for people who might like to live within an hour or two of their jobs. This is where an obligatory joke about baby boomer governance should probably go.
I'd expect this problem to be solved far more by people living in denser residences than by abolishing grocery stores. Supermarkets and parking lot space devoted to them make up a lot less than 1% of all land use in suburban areas. Increasing the density of residences by 10% (say, because a lot of single-family homes on their own lawns get replaced by duplexes or something) would do a lot more to solve the problem. Compared to, say, razing the supermarkets, filling half the land they take up with a few more houses, and filling the other half with automated distribution centers, which still take up considerable physical space because the food has to be stored somewhere even if nothing is inside except drones motoring around picking up food and dumping it into boxes.

If the problem is the suburbs having a bunch of wasted land, the solution is to buy up single family homes, tear them down, and replace them with apartments. The solution to "all good jobs are in cities, but cities are overcrowded" is "expand the zone of territory that has 'urban' development patterns, at the expense of 'suburban' development patterns in general.

That said, you make a valid point about rising land prices affecting supermarkets. This point holds so long as supermarkets remain unprofitable when land prices are high. Arguing against your point is the fact that supermarkets do exist in urban areas, often as the ground floor(s) of a larger structure zoned commercially.

Although prices do tend to be higher in such supermarkets, I'll grant.
Bedlam wrote:
General Zod wrote:Here's the other problem with drones. What happens in an emergency? Say a severe blizzard is coming up; are there going to be enough drones to keep everyone stocked up before the blizzard hits in a reasonable amount of time? Will some people just be screwed when they could have otherwise gone to the store?
I don't think this is any more of a problem than the current situation, you currently get panic buying which can mean that those who wait can't get what they need or some issue stopping delivery to specific stores. I suppose you could argue that it's another possible point of failure which will make things worse but that's not really a drone specific issue, it could be argued that small flying drones would actually make it easier to get supplies to people rather than them having to walk / drive to a nearby store although it depends on the emergency.
Typical grocery orders can very easily weigh ten kilograms or more. A flying drone big enough to handle grocery deliveries reliably is going to be pretty darn big- at some point the maintenance requirements on the drone become prohibitive. I'm pretty sure any viable 'robot delivery' system is going to revolve around automated cars, not automated helicopters.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by His Divine Shadow »

Man the way this is going with denser living and all that shitting shit I hope I won't live to see the future people are clamoring for.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by madd0ct0r »

Is mildly amused by people in this thread suggesting grocery stores on the bottom floor or two of a eight storey building are a problem.

Urban planners in America have been fighting to get more stores at street level for years. They may be less profitable than a ground floor flat but they make the urban landscape more luv able and push property prices up generally.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by mr friendly guy »

Simon_Jester wrote: Typical grocery orders can very easily weigh ten kilograms or more. A flying drone big enough to handle grocery deliveries reliably is going to be pretty darn big- at some point the maintenance requirements on the drone become prohibitive. I'm pretty sure any viable 'robot delivery' system is going to revolve around automated cars, not automated helicopters.
That's a good point. As a single man who doesn't eat much, my groceries aren't much. However I have seen people fill their entire shopping trolley with stuff. I imagine one would need a big drone or several drones for all that.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Zaune »

I expect the supermarkets will change their delivery price plans from a flat fee for each delivery (varying according to the time of day the order is placed) to $n per five kilos, or whatever the rated maximum payload per drone is.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by General Zod »

mr friendly guy wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote: Typical grocery orders can very easily weigh ten kilograms or more. A flying drone big enough to handle grocery deliveries reliably is going to be pretty darn big- at some point the maintenance requirements on the drone become prohibitive. I'm pretty sure any viable 'robot delivery' system is going to revolve around automated cars, not automated helicopters.
That's a good point. As a single man who doesn't eat much, my groceries aren't much. However I have seen people fill their entire shopping trolley with stuff. I imagine one would need a big drone or several drones for all that.
A lot of these people are also stocking up for up to a month at a time to minimize their shopping trips. As opposed to just a week or two at a time.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Simon_Jester »

Zaune wrote:I expect the supermarkets will change their delivery price plans from a flat fee for each delivery (varying according to the time of day the order is placed) to $n per five kilos, or whatever the rated maximum payload per drone is.
I suspect that robot cars that drive up to your home, park outside, and call you on your cell phone to tell you your groceries have arrived will turn out to be much more economical to operate than flying delivery drones. Airborne delivery may be available as an optional alternative for people in a hurry, I suppose?
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Zaune »

Could be. Although I can see definite drawbacks to having a driverless van containing a large amount of potentially quite valuable stuff (you can buy a new TV or laptop and have it delivered with your groceries if you really want to) parked up in a rough part of town for however long it takes the customer to unload it. A drone can at least set down in your back garden or on the balcony so as to present a less tempting target for opportunistic thieves.

And of course this is very much a long-term model; for the time being it's unlikely that automation can improve on simply paying someone to unload the groceries from the van and carry them to the customer's front door.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Crazedwraith »

Also does the Driverless car only do one delivery at a time? Otherwise you have to have some system of subdividing the cargo area so you can only take your own stuff, not stuff for the next person's delivery. Likewise you'd need a system for okaying/denying the substitutions to your order that they currently do for online delivery.

The idea that drone/driveless car delivery are going to be taking over for actual shops any time soon doesn't seem likely. Even less so that supermarkets would entirely disappear because it.

At most I'd expect a big reduction in numbers of big stores. And relatively larger numbers of stores like Sainsburys Local or Tesco Metro. Little shops you can get the essentials at at zero notice.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Zaune »

You wouldn't even see much of a reduction in the big stores, come to that, because for at least some chains they double as local distribution hubs for the home-delivery service anyway. They might eventually shift to a model where they're primarily a warehouse that the general public are allowed into for part of the day if they really want to pick their purchases out in person, but I doubt they'll ever entirely vanish.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Broomstick »

madd0ct0r wrote:Is mildly amused by people in this thread suggesting grocery stores on the bottom floor or two of a eight storey building are a problem.

Urban planners in America have been fighting to get more stores at street level for years. They may be less profitable than a ground floor flat but they make the urban landscape more luv able and push property prices up generally.
In the Chicago Loop it's not unknown for grocery stores to be located a floor or two below ground level, or above the street-level floor. This drops overhead considerably, allowing for lower prices, greater profits, or both. Tourist would tend not to notice such things, but they're there.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Broomstick »

TithonusSyndrome wrote:What you are blustering incoherently about is finding an alternative to capitalism.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
This is outside the scope of the current topic
And you dictate the limits of the current thread because.... oh, right, you don't.
I didn't realize that self-driving cars and drones were part of the labor market in the 1980s? It didn't take off then so it can't take off in the near-future when the right tech is properly implemented, is that the argument?
No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days I was taken seriously by my peers and not such a laughingstock who alienated everyone around me
^ Where the fuck does the above come from? Or are you modifying my words which, by the way, is against forum rules.
Long story short; Broomstick is an illiterate retard who didn't take into account the fact that the whole reason this model of grocery delivery is being revisited in the first place is because automation makes the economics viable enough to reexamine
Re-examine? Certainly. Accept it as inherently superior, workable, or even viable in the real world is a different matter. Dismissal of history is stupid, and the mark of naive youth that is convinced that it knows better than everyone else and that experience doesn't matter.
[Classic "here's a statistically irrelevant exception to the rule" Broomstick. Pair it with some meandering anecdotes about the time in 1987 she bought a crepe from a farmer's market in Indiana and the package will be complete.
Bleargh, hate crepes. Also, hadn't been to Indiana in 1987 yet. OK, passing through on the way to and from Chicago, but not, you know, living there because I was still going through that larval phase when City Living Is the Future!!! and who would want to live in the suburbs or the hicks? Hey, I grew out of that narrow-minded view. Maybe you will, too.
You're a miserable self-hating old loser who wants to pantomime the appearance of wisdom in front of an audience in a setting she is relatively certain she has some assurances of not being universally laughed at. After over a decade of residence on a forum where phrases like "the plural of anecdote is not data" were in common currency, and probably more than one article posted to the site about the malleability of individual human memory in the form of phenomena like the Rashomon Effect, she still thinks the "life experience" card is anything other than a gimmick that merits nothing past puzzled looks of concern and alarm.
Actually, I love myself just fine. But don't worry, child, when you grow up and get some actual life experience you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Farmers' markets are a growing segment. Are they the dominant means of obtaining groceries? No - but they aren't going away, either. You are suffering from the delusion that there can be one and only one answer to any life problem. In reality, there are multiple solutions to "where do I get my food?" for most people in the industrial world.
"Oh, wait", this is just Broomstick's incipient dementia coming into bloom.
Oh, look - someone has no argument so let's engage in ad hominem attacks.
Next time, try a valid debating tactic.
That statement was issued in tandem with no less than two valid arguments.
It's still exists as an ad hominem attack. If you had confidence in your ability to debate you wouldn't feel the need to do that. It demonstrates a lack of confidence, and insecurity in your own position.
Broomstick; illiterate retard, twice proven.
Look! More ad hominem. And one obviously false as I am demonstrably quite literate. My arguments may or may not be wrong, but they are delivered in understandable English.
This is your favorite thing to do in these arguments; rattle off every possible counteracting factor without any regard for their magnitude, statistical likelihood or significance.
Uh... yeah. I thought coming up with opposing arguments was the whole point of having a debate.
Listing nickel-and-dime non-arguments isn't debate. It's padding, which you resort to quite often.
So? I'm doing this for my own amusement, not to win points in a contest. And I like pursuing the minutiae in these sorts of discussions. If you don't like to do so then don't.
I guess if you don't know this, maybe you could benefit from some more life experience.
Certainly we can all benefit from more life experience. I'm working on my second half-century, how much time have you put in on the planet?
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by SCRawl »

With respect to this post -- specifically, the text highlighted below:
Broomstick wrote:
No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days I was taken seriously by my peers and not such a laughingstock who alienated everyone around me
^ Where the fuck does the above come from? Or are you modifying my words which, by the way, is against forum rules.
...the highlighted text was actually:
Broomstick wrote:No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days human beings would pick out groceries from phone orders and deliver them in a local area. You also willfully missed my point about it far pre-dating the 1980's. Through the first half of the 20th Century home delivery of items like milk, ice, and other staples were routine. The concept is nothing new. Then it was largely abandoned. Now suddenly you think it's a new invention. Guess what - the world is older than you are, your experience with the world short-lived, and some of us remember when what you describe as "new" was in fact a routine part of life.

Delivery of groceries is not a new concept. Doing with drones is a new technique, that's all. Stop patting yourself on the back congratulating yourself on reinventing the wheel.
TithonusSyndrome, you might think that it's funny to deliberately misquote someone without any reference to having made the alteration, but it really isn't. You also made no attempt to refute the points made. This is a violation of PR3 ("Be honest"), and whether or not you think it's all a big laugh, this is a serious issue.

You will now address the argument or withdraw yours. In the meantime the administration will consider whether or not more severe punishment is necessary, and you will consider yourself to have been officially warned.

(For anyone else reading, if you're going to misquote another user in a debate, you must do so making it very clear that you are doing the alteration, and you must still address any arguments made in the unaltered text. This is not optional.)
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Simon_Jester »

Zaune wrote:Could be. Although I can see definite drawbacks to having a driverless van containing a large amount of potentially quite valuable stuff (you can buy a new TV or laptop and have it delivered with your groceries if you really want to)...
I kind of doubt that would become a thing, simply because the cost of an extra drone delivery trip just isn't that high, and there's no good reason for perishable food and nonperishable electronics to be stored at the same distribution center.

So it would probably not become possible to have that happen, for the same reason that as a rule, you can't get pizza and Chinese food delivered by the same person: because they come from different stores with different delivery staff.
Zaune wrote:You wouldn't even see much of a reduction in the big stores, come to that, because for at least some chains they double as local distribution hubs for the home-delivery service anyway. They might eventually shift to a model where they're primarily a warehouse that the general public are allowed into for part of the day if they really want to pick their purchases out in person, but I doubt they'll ever entirely vanish.
Well, the big advantage here in terms of "buy robots, save on labor" would be converting the supermarket into a warehouse that's designed to be navigated by drones during business hours and workers only during off hours when the robots aren't doing anything. This might result in a very different layout than a typical supermarket.

For example, typical supermarkets only have one floor level because people have to wheel around in shopping carts and don't like the idea of sticking their shopping cart in a freight elevator. With drone shopping carts with robot arms to pluck stuff off the storage shelves, that wouldn't be an issue.

Supermarkets have to organize and lay out their products in ways that are attractive and make sense to the consumer. That tends to take up more space than might otherwise be necessary if all the groceries are being retrieved by robots that have the location of every object in the store memorized and don't care if detergent is placed next to canned soup.

I find it quite believable that an automated distribution facility for drone grocery deliveries could be quite a bit more compact than a grocery store servicing the same number of people. But it's going to be something like 10-20 years at least before all the pieces of the puzzle are in place, and even then there will be issues like "inefficient delivery strategy OR have multiple people's groceries in the car at the same time" and "the drones aren't good at noticing when a carton of eggs cracks and pours yolk all over the contents of the grocery bag."
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Lagmonster »

It may be worth mentioning that customer service strategies will differ based on location. A lot of people, when they plan their robot delivery operations, imagine urban centres only. There are delivery/service models that work better or worse when you have to factor in crowded skyscrapers or kilometer-long dirt driveways into the bargain.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Zaune »

Simon_Jester wrote:I kind of doubt that would become a thing, simply because the cost of an extra drone delivery trip just isn't that high, and there's no good reason for perishable food and nonperishable electronics to be stored at the same distribution center.

So it would probably not become possible to have that happen, for the same reason that as a rule, you can't get pizza and Chinese food delivered by the same person: because they come from different stores with different delivery staff.
You'd be surprised. The 'distribution centre' from which I get my groceries delivered is the stockroom of the Asda superstore across town; they've got perishable food and non-perishable electronics and a whole hell of a lot else stored in the same location. Admittedly it turns out that big stuff like flatscreen TVs have to be ordered through a separate system, probably because the food delivery trucks aren't suited to transporting them, but if I need a new microwave or a Playstation 4 or anything else that will fit inside the big plastic crates the pickers fill and load onboard the truck then I can get it delivered along with my groceries.

I can't say I've ever felt the need to do so, but it's an option. I think their next-day delivery option is a bit cheaper than Amazon's too.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Gandalf »

Simon, I'm sorry this turned into four points. Feel free to amalgamate as needed, because more than two tends to shit me up the wall.
Simon_Jester wrote:I'd expect this problem to be solved far more by people living in denser residences than by abolishing grocery stores. Supermarkets and parking lot space devoted to them make up a lot less than 1% of all land use in suburban areas. Increasing the density of residences by 10% (say, because a lot of single-family homes on their own lawns get replaced by duplexes or something) would do a lot more to solve the problem. Compared to, say, razing the supermarkets, filling half the land they take up with a few more houses, and filling the other half with automated distribution centers, which still take up considerable physical space because the food has to be stored somewhere even if nothing is inside except drones motoring around picking up food and dumping it into boxes.
We have those supermarket/apartment buildings, and they're fucking nightmares if you're nearby. The logistics of supplying a supermarket doesn't mesh well with apartments. It's a great model for smaller stores though who don't need a huge footprint relative to their floorspace, though they have their own problems.
If the problem is the suburbs having a bunch of wasted land, the solution is to buy up single family homes, tear them down, and replace them with apartments. The solution to "all good jobs are in cities, but cities are overcrowded" is "expand the zone of territory that has 'urban' development patterns, at the expense of 'suburban' development patterns in general.
That's going on here, but when people learn that their houses are ideal for this process they start charging way more to bidders/investors, and thus there's a huge bubble in the making which if burst could take a lot of Australia's economy with it. I think I posted a thread on this a while back if you're interested.
That said, you make a valid point about rising land prices affecting supermarkets. This point holds so long as supermarkets remain unprofitable when land prices are high. Arguing against your point is the fact that supermarkets do exist in urban areas, often as the ground floor(s) of a larger structure zoned commercially.

Although prices do tend to be higher in such supermarkets, I'll grant.
Yeah, we have those here, and they're pretty ridiculously priced compared to what one gets in a more residential area from the same chain. When a supermarket has similar prices to a convenience store, there's trouble afoot.
Simon_Jester wrote:So it would probably not become possible to have that happen, for the same reason that as a rule, you can't get pizza and Chinese food delivered by the same person: because they come from different stores with different delivery staff.
There used to be a service near me where that was possible, where a local delivery business would pick up whatever you wanted from a selection of local stores and deliver it to your home for a small fee. But it was only possible in a suburb with both medium to high density and a medium to high income level.
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by Dalton »

SCRawl wrote:With respect to this post -- specifically, the text highlighted below:
Broomstick wrote:
No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days I was taken seriously by my peers and not such a laughingstock who alienated everyone around me
^ Where the fuck does the above come from? Or are you modifying my words which, by the way, is against forum rules.
...the highlighted text was actually:
Broomstick wrote:No, you fucking ignoramus - in the old days human beings would pick out groceries from phone orders and deliver them in a local area. You also willfully missed my point about it far pre-dating the 1980's. Through the first half of the 20th Century home delivery of items like milk, ice, and other staples were routine. The concept is nothing new. Then it was largely abandoned. Now suddenly you think it's a new invention. Guess what - the world is older than you are, your experience with the world short-lived, and some of us remember when what you describe as "new" was in fact a routine part of life.

Delivery of groceries is not a new concept. Doing with drones is a new technique, that's all. Stop patting yourself on the back congratulating yourself on reinventing the wheel.
TithonusSyndrome, you might think that it's funny to deliberately misquote someone without any reference to having made the alteration, but it really isn't. You also made no attempt to refute the points made. This is a violation of PR3 ("Be honest"), and whether or not you think it's all a big laugh, this is a serious issue.

You will now address the argument or withdraw yours. In the meantime the administration will consider whether or not more severe punishment is necessary, and you will consider yourself to have been officially warned.

(For anyone else reading, if you're going to misquote another user in a debate, you must do so making it very clear that you are doing the alteration, and you must still address any arguments made in the unaltered text. This is not optional.)

It's 3 days later. Any update on this situation, TithonusSyndrome, or do I have to get involved?
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Re: Flippy the Burger bot

Post by TithonusSyndrome »

No, that's quite fine. Life got in the way for a bit, but I can attend to this now.
SCRawl wrote:]TithonusSyndrome, you might think that it's funny to deliberately misquote someone without any reference to having made the alteration, but it really isn't.
The alteration was so substantial and so self-evident it beggars the imagination that anyone would require a specific reference. If you insist on it I'm sure I can oblige, but why this wouldn't fall under the discretionary powers of moderator interpretation of the spirit of the rules is suspicious.
You also made no attempt to refute the points made. This is a violation of PR3 ("Be honest"), and whether or not you think it's all a big laugh, this is a serious issue.
This is either an honest mistake or a lie, because I most definitely did address it in saying this:
she somehow thinks that recounting the minutiae of the prior incarnation of this system qualifies as a rebuttal of some kind
This is a reference to Broomstick's habit of padding, the forumgoing equivalent of trying to stretch out the word count of an essay by inserting material of dubious relevance to the matter at hand, ie, the specifics of the older, prior model of grocery delivery which is not under examination and not being disputed by any participant here. In pointing out that this bloviating recount of this old model of grocery delivery does not address any of the topics under discussion, and is likely simply another one of her meandering grandma stories intended to pantomime worldliness and wisdom to the local audience, I refuted her non-point, and conclusively.

If someone feels this is somehow not a rebuttal for reasons unknown, that's their opinion, but suggesting I "made no attempt to refute the points made" is itself disingenuous because there were no points made. Minutiae was recounted, which is not the same thing as making a point. In parsing this distinction, I most definitely strove in good faith to refute the points, such as they may be considered.
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